I look at the faces around me, and they are a smorgasbord of unhappiness. Resignation. Confusion. Frustration. Anger. Anxiety. And then there are the shoulder-shruggers. This is a home affairs queue for IDs and passports on a Monday morning. I think it's the shoulder-shruggers who get to me most because they seem to say: "It's a black government. What more can you expect?" It's racist logic because the apartheid bureaucracy was built to frustrate and keep black citizens down and insulated in the bantustans and group areas. The democratic home affairs should be efficient and caring as an act of decolonialism and commitment to freedom. It's not. Instead, the system at the Randburg office is laughable. You queue four times for a single transaction. Queue 1: get a number. Queue 2: go back outside and queue to get a photograph taken. Queue 3: see a consultant. Queue 4: pay. All the queues snake into each other, and the signage is so poor that nobody knows what to do. An outsourced securi...
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